Shared taxi rides surge in New York City, as do concerns about congestion

New Yorkers are increasingly navigating the city in shared ride-hail vehicles affiliated with companies like Via and Uber Pool, a development that experts warn adds yet another coagulant to New York City’s already congested streets.

Every day in February 2018 — the most recent month for which numbers were available — Via, Uber Pool and Lyft Line provided an average of 141,000 shared rides, according to the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. That’s more than double the 69,000 daily rides they provided in July 2017, when the commission first started tracking such numbers.

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It’s a number that city officials and industry experts expect to keep rising, thanks in part to the sorry state of New York City’s subway and bus system and the high expectations of New York’s teeming population of young professionals. Experts say residents' increasing preference for these services could further undermine the public transit systems they are trying to escape.

“The customer went to the best colleges and grad schools, dresses nicely, goes to the best restaurants, has a nice apartment and is being crammed on the subway?" asked transportation consultant Bruce Schaller in a recent interview.

“In any other part of the country,” he said,”they’d be driving their own BMW around town.”

To accommodate those riders, Via, Lyft Line and Uber Pool have taken an old concept — the dollar vans that ply busy avenues in working-class neighborhoods with poor transit — and adapted it to the desires of the young and upwardly mobile. They allow customers to share rides in cars or vans for a cheaper price than private Uber or Lyft rides. Unlike cash-only dollar vans, credit cards are a must.

And thanks to venture capital funding, the economic efficiencies inherent to carpooling, and the fact that riders can now use pre-tax commuter benefits, experts say prices for shared taxi trips have fallen irresistibly low for some straphangers.

At a recent City Council hearing, New York City's taxi commissioner, Meera Joshi, predicted that the market for shared rides would soon expand to encompass people "that we haven’t traditionally thought of as taxi customers."

“When the price point gets closer and closer to what it costs to take a subway, many people are going to opt to take a shared ride in a private vehicle instead,” Joshi said.

If that concerns the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which relies on fare revenue to help fund its operations, it’s not saying.

But several experts interviewed for this article said that the phenomenon could only bode ill for New York City’s mass transit services — particularly its bus system, which relies on the same street infrastructure as for-hire vehicles and which has for years been losing riders, even as the city’s population and economy have grown.

“There’s a vicious cycle that I believe is going on here, and it’s crippling bus operations in the city,” said transportation engineer and former Via consultant Sam Schwartz.

“Add traffic, buses get slower, buses get less attractive, people switch to Uber, Uber Pool, Via, Lyft Line,” he said. That worsens traffic even more.

It’s a concern shared by Riders Alliance Executive Director John Raskin, who has spent the past several years advocating for better bus service on New York City streets.

“If people do leave public transportation, it can create a downward spiral in which poor service leads to low demand, which leads to financial decisions made to reduce service further,” he said.

Asked for comment, Uber spokeswoman Alix Anfang suggested that if public transportation were better, there would be less of a need for Uber Pool in the first place.

"UberPOOL is most popular outside of Manhattan where we are able to offer New Yorkers an affordable ride in areas underserved by mass transit,” she said.

Via didn't respond to requests for comment.

For its part, Lyft touted its commitment to "reducing cars on the road.”

“Lyft Line usage has more than doubled in the past year, and in NYC, one third of Lyft rides are shared,” said spokeswoman Campbell Matthews. “The data shows many passengers use Lyft and Lyft Line for first mile/last mile connections with transit and to move around areas historically underserved by cabs.”

Other data suggest that services like Via, Uber Pool and Lyft Line may actually be adding to the number of miles traveled on city streets.

In 2017, Schaller published a widely cited report entitled “UNSUSTAINABLE? The Growth of App-Based Ride Services and Traffic, Travel and the Future of New York City.”

Drawing on data collected by New York City, he found that, even if "transportation network companies" like Uber and Lyft are offering shared rides, “migration from public transit translates to increased mileage.”

“As long as [transportation network company] riders are coming predominantly from transit, walking and biking, TNC growth translates to increased mileage,” Schaller wrote. “Moreover, mileage reductions from pooling among TNC passengers who switch from personal autos may be offset by the ‘dead-head’ miles driven between passenger trips.”

By Schaller’s calculations, private and pooled Ubers, Lyfts and the like contributed 600 million miles of vehicle travel to the city's roads in three years' time.

Since that report came out last year, “these trends have steepened,” said Jon Orcutt, the former policy director at New York City's Transportation Department and current advocacy director at TransitCenter.